I slapped my palm against a wall panel, and a doorway opened. I let the others go before me, allowing myself one final glance into the Ring.
Home, I thought.
The door shut behind me.
We walked the corridor down toward our ships. The Ring’s hollow spoke, nearly lightless, consumed us. At its end, Mina and Babar lowered their helmets and pressurized their suits. They’d have to float into their Xiphos ships.
“Remember, stay silent on your coms unless you’ve no other choice,” I said. “The Vark will be expecting us. We must give them no advantage.”
They said nothing. They understood.
Within seconds, they were both through the smaller of two airlocks. Mina never once glanced back at Strope. Whatever bond they’d shared on Hermes was lost, and the distance between them as wide as the space between Hades and the cloud of dust they’d once called home.
Did you ever love her? I wanted to ask.
It doesn’t matter now, I knew.
The Ring’s primary airlock hissed open. Strope and I stepped through the portal and into another door, and then stood in the shadows within the Sabre’s cockpit.
“Did you know?” He looked at me in the near total dark. “I’ve never seen one face-to-face before? Maliah made me Commander because she liked how our soldiers responded to me. But I’ve never faced a Vark down. I’ve only ever killed them from far away. Sometimes I wonder how I even got here.”
I’d known.
I’d seen the hidden terror in his eyes after I’d faced the imprisoned Strigoi.
But I’d never said a word.
“Are you saying you can’t do this?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m saying I’m looking forward to it. You said the Vark are nothing more than dark energy. But I know what they really are. They’re monsters. Why else would they choose the shapes of bones and death? Why, unless they’re evil?”
Evil doesn’t exist, I almost told him.
Our enemy wants the same things we do.
Guaranteed survival.
“Evil.” I nodded. “Yes. For all they’ve done, they deserve to die.”
The lie felt necessary.
We sank into our seats. I lowered the Gamma’s helmet over my face and fastened the arm-cannon to my right arm. If the universe had been silent before I’d put on the helmet, afterward the quiet felt absolute. Behind my armor, I existed in a world of my own.
Not evil, I imagined the Strigoi.
In need of annihilation all the same.
“Ready?” I asked Strope. “We’re igniting the engines to maximum. We’ll be going several hundred-million kilometers per second. When we stop, I have my guesses as to what we’ll find. But I could be wrong.”
“Yes, I know.” He managed a smirk. “We could die instantaneously. You’ve told me a dozen times already.”
“Buckle yourself in,” I told him.
I pulled one of twenty triggers inside the arm-cannon, opening a brief com channel between me and the two Xiphos ships.
“Ready?” I asked Mina and Babar.
“In position,” said Babar.
“Goodbye, Lightbringer,” said Mina.
I imagined her cracking a smile.
I tapped a pulsing blue symbol above the Sabre’s console.
And we were gone.
Heart of Hades
I opened my eyes and saw that which the living had always feared.
Death.
The Ring’s quantum engines cut off, and the Sabre detached. As my fingers darted over the console, my eyes consumed what lay beyond the cockpit window.
A behemoth planet, many times larger than any terrestrial world I’d ever encountered, hung in the darkness before me. Strope didn’t react to it—he couldn’t see it in the dark. But with the Gamma’s visor, all things were naked to me.
The Strigoi world, hollow as a bloodless heart, pulsed in the darkness. Towers a hundred kilometers high pierced the eternal night, their pale windows gleaming. An ocean of satellites far deadlier than any I’d warred against spun in a slow circle above the planet’s cold, dead surface.
I imagined billions of Strigoi sleeping in the shadows.
Not billions. Trillions.
“What is it?” Strope looked at me. “What do you see?”
I ignited the Sabre’s engines and swung the ship away from the gargantuan planet. Streams of enemy vessels cut through the blackness above and below me. I knew what their numbers meant.
“I guessed right,” I said. “It’s a Vark homeworld—bigger than anything. I can see thousands of ships.”
“Thousands?” He shivered. “Doing what?”
“Stripping the core from the Vark planet and delivering material elsewhere. The world…it’s almost completely hollow. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He asked more questions:
“Are they attacking?”
“Did Mina and Babar make it?”
“Can you see the Tombspire? Is it here?”
I ignored them all.
There’s no time.
The Strigoi know we’re here.
I looked up at the Sabre’s vid-screens. Scythe-winged Strigoi ships peeled away from their transport lines and came after us by the hundred. In the vid-screens’ x-ray spectrum, the enemy craft looked like ghosts. They were white instead of black, their wings like the bones of ghastly, unearthly birds.
I banked the Sabre at a hard angle. Instead of heading for the giant hollow planet, we tore through darkness away from it. Strope couldn’t see much. He froze in his seat, pale and powerless.
I almost regretted bringing him.
But I might need him.
We soared away from the planet. The Strigoi ships pursued us. Just before accelerating, I glimpsed flashes of light on one of the Sabre’s vid-screens. The white glimmers erupted near the Strigoi world, brief in duration, yet bright as any star.
I allowed myself a last smile.
Mina and Babar.
They’re here.
And they’re fighting.
In the next instant, my smile fell away. I saw shapes in the distant dark, massive things blacker than black. I counted at least three-dozen of the giants, each one many thousands of kilometers in size. They looked like giant rings made of Strigoi bone, vast unholy jewels floating in the void.
We headed straight for them.
“Coffin Engines,” I said to Strope. “Thirty, at least. Big enough to thread planets through their hearts. Asleep, but ready to wake.”
He said something. I didn’t hear him.
How many planets harvested to create such machines? I wondered.
How many millions of years dedicated to building our destruction?
“They want the whole universe,” I said.
I snared the control stick with my left hand and looked at Strope.
“We’re accelerating to combat speed. Release light beacons in ten seconds. Wide spread. All directions.”
“How many?” he asked.
“All of them.”
I pushed the Sabre through the dark. The Strigoi were almost on us, skeletal wings massing above, below, and behind. Calm, I accelerated to a few hundred-thousand kilometers per hour, slowed, and sped up again.
…for all the good it did us.
The Sabre’s quantum engines strained with my abuse. But the Strigoi drew nearer. No matter my skill, no matter how many times I turned, rolled, or accelerated, hundreds of nightmare ships screamed after us. They were Strigoi, after all, and mistakes were unknown to them.
Sixty seconds, I thought. All we need.
Strope hammered his finger down through a floating blue button, expelling waves of light beacons from the Sabre’s underbelly. The tiny silver orbs leapt into the abyss, fanning out behind us. Wherever they erupted, flashes of light pocked giant holes in the darkness. Several dozen Strigoi ships got caught up in the light.
And disintegrated into fine white powder.
If we had five-
hundred Sabre’s, we could win this fight.
But we’ve only one.
Still, the Strigoi advanced. Near enough to fire on us, they swarmed in a dark mass a few hundred kilometers behind the Sabre. Ropes of deadly black energy made ragged holes in the night, some barely missing the Sabre’s wings. I knew how to avoid the death-beams, but not in such vast numbers, and not for an extended time.
Thirty seconds.
Just have to get closer.
There.
That one.
“Fire String Reprogrammers,” I commanded Strope. “One each at the three nearest Coffin Engines. None at the one directly ahead.”
“I can’t see them.” He sounded panicked. “I can’t aim.”
“Just do it. It doesn’t matter if they hit anything. It’s just a distraction.”
He knew my plan.
He questioned it anyway.
“All three S.R.’s? Won’t we need them to—”
“We’re not attacking the planet.” I cut him off. “You know what we’re doing.”
He hammered his command into his console. I’d have done it, but I needed every bit of my concentration to outmaneuver the three-hundred Strigoi craft spitting death-beams from every direction.
Roll.
Speed up.
Slow down.
Forty-three degree turn left.
Slow down.
Fifteen seconds.
The calculations happened in my mind a million times faster than my hand could move the Sabre’s control stick. It almost felt easy. Between fractions of seconds, I even allowed myself a memory of Joff, who’d done the same dance when he’d fought the Strigoi a thousand years ago.
He did it just as well, I imagined.
And with a mind fully human.
With a burst of the Sabre’s light lances, I cut a path through three Strigoi ships. The streams of white light burned them away like paper, and afterward their remains floated like confetti suspended in midair.
“The S.R.’s…” Strope looked at me. “…they failed to detonate. The Vark…they shot them down.”
I’d known before he said it.
Just ahead, only five-thousand kilometers away, my true target loomed. The Coffin Engine hung in the shadow, a black ring big enough to swallow a hundred Hermes’.
“God, what is that?” Strope glimpsed the spectral image on a vid-screen.
“I’m going in,” I said.
We sailed through a storm of death-beams. We couldn’t avoid them all. Our wings caught fire with black light, the armor melting away. To buy a few last seconds, I accelerated the wounded Sabre through a cloud of inert particles, whose color glinted blue in the reflection of the Sabre’s light lances.
I knew what the particles were. Their complete immobility in space gave them away.
Pieces of a planet killed by a Coffin Engine.
Five seconds, I thought.
Only one chance.
“Close your eyes,” I said to Strope.
“Cal, I—”
One-hundred ten kilometers from the Coffin Engine, I leveled the Gamma Suit’s arm-cannon at the Sabre’s cockpit window and pulled the largest trigger. A burst of nuclear radiance, bright enough to hurt my eyes through the Gamma’s dark visor, erupted from the cannon’s end and disintegrated the window. The sudden vacuum tore the Sabre’s innards to pieces. A glass storm from my shattered resurrection cylinders poured into the darkness.
If we hadn’t buckled ourselves in, we’d have died instantly.
The Sabre’s console flickered off, then on again.
Our chair buckles held.
In another half-second, we’d have struck the Coffin Engine at speeds high enough to turn our bodies into dust. I waited until the last possible moment, and then I swept my fingers across the console, bringing the Sabre to a sudden stop.
The gravity controls seized.
A pair of death-beams hit the Sabre’s right wing.
Faster than fast, I broke through my buckles and leapt to my feet. I tore Strope out of his chair and propelled both of us out of the Sabre’s nose.
Be perfect, Cal, I ordered myself.
Don’t die.
We soared into the black of space. I saw Strope’s face through his visor. He was unconscious, his eyes rolled back into his head. Tucked under my arm, he hung like a fish as we flew away from the Sabre and toward the Coffin Engine’s black-bone flank.
I didn’t need to look back. I knew the Strigoi had already destroyed the Sabre. I imagined it burning away, its wings like dry kindling, my resurrection cylinders turned to powder.
Doesn’t matter.
The Engine…a half-kilometer ahead.
The Strigoi didn’t fire at us. Either they didn’t dare unleash their death-beams so close to the Coffin Engine, or they hadn’t yet realized we’d leapt out of the Sabre.
The black wall of the Coffin Engine rose up before me. At a few hundred meters, I looked at the giant horror, and for an instant I despaired.
It’s too big.
We could search for a hundred years and never find what we’re looking for.
Be silent.
I raised the arm-cannon and fired. The weapon I unleashed wasn’t the explosive I’d used to blow out the Sabre’s window, but something else entirely.
Something made just for fighting Strigoi.
I closed my eyes and imagined what happened. The searing rope of sunlight tore through the dark, struck the Coffin Engine’s bone polymers, and carved a narrow hole straight through the outer hull.
I opened my eyes.
And it was so.
The arm-cannon’s light lance punctured a perfect wound through the Strigoi polymer. My hope was rewarded. In Hades, as in all other corners of the universe, the Strigoi and everything they made were vulnerable to light.
The scythe ships peeled away an instant before colliding with the Engine. They’d chased us, but hadn’t reacted quickly enough to destroy us.
At a few hundred kilometers per hour, we soared straight into the hole I’d burned. I shut my eyes and fired twice more, cooking my way through another layer of black bone.
Strope awakened just as we penetrated the Engine’s hull. I saw his eyes, his fear, and I spun my body so that I flew backward, holding him face-to-face against my visor.
“Look at me,” I whispered to him. “Don’t look anywhere else. If we—”
Somewhere in the dark, we collided with a mass of bone. It might’ve been a wall, a floor, or another layer of black armor shielding the Engine’s innards from space—I didn’t know.
We hit the bone at speeds high enough to kill any human who’d ever lived.
And we survived.
The Shadow Hall
“We shouldn’t be alive,” Strope sat up in the darkness.
In a vast corridor somewhere inside the Coffin Engine, I clambered to my feet. The hollow hall into which we’d fallen stretched to the end of sights, its rounded walls shaped of mortared black bones.
We’d made a small crater where we’d impacted.
Strope was right.
We shouldn’t have survived.
“There’s no Strigoi here.” I pushed the bone dust off the Gamma Suit’s visor. “There’s no anything.”
As I brushed away the black powder, a display came alive on my helmet’s insides. The letters, blue and tiny, were the only lights in existence. In silence, I read them:
Impact detection – one-hundred ninety-seven kilometers per hour.
No damage sustained.
Lucky. I thumped the Gamma Suit’s breastplate. We landed just right.
“How’s your suit?” I looked down at Strope. He’d woken minutes ago, but had yet to stand. I worried he’d broken his bones, but my suit had absorbed the impact of everything.
“It’s fine,” he grunted.
“And your ego?”
“It’s been better.”
“Can you see?”
He looked up at me. Behind his visor, his
face was pale and sweating.
“Everything looks ghostly.” He staggered to his feet. “All these years, I’ve never used my x-ray visor. Never had to. I think I hate it.”
“You’ll get used to it.” I shrugged.
Together, we peered up at the hole we’d fallen through. Smooth-edged and little larger than my Gamma Suit, the puncture wound in the Coffin Engine’s wall loomed sixty meters above us. Beyond that, another hole lay a hundred meters farther out.
“The hull’s breached, but no vacuum.” Strope pointed.
“There’s no pressure in here,” I said. “No air. Nothing.”
I flicked two tiny triggers inside my arm-cannon. More blue symbols flared up inside my helmet:
Temperature: Negative two-hundred forty-five degrees Celsius
Pressure: Nil
Gravity: 0.973338 m/s
“It’s cold in here. Very cold,” I said. “Almost absolute zero. What’s strange is…the gravity…it’s almost Earthlike.”
“Earthlike?” he said.
He doesn’t know what I mean.
I flicked another trigger, and another stream of words sprang into my view:
Sabre condition: Destroyed. No systems online
Ring condition: Intact. All systems online
“They haven’t destroyed the Ring.” I shrugged. “Maybe they’ll try to board it—maybe crack into its database.”
“Wouldn’t that be bad?” he said.
“No.” I shook my head. “I deleted every piece of core data before we left. All the maps, all the important information…gone.”
His eyes widened.
He didn’t realize how thorough I’d been.
“So…even if we somehow pull this off…even if we survive…we can’t go home?” he asked.
“We won’t survive,” I reminded him. “But if we do, I have the Ring’s data stored inside me. So…in theory…we could plug me into the console and go home.”
“All that information inside you…” He looked stunned.
“It’s not as much as you think,” I said. “Takes up less than twenty-percent of my storage capacity.”
He wanted to say more. The violence of our descent had wrenched him out of the dark cloud in which his mind had settled. He seemed almost like himself again.
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